Report: KDE at LugRadio Live

LugRadio is a fortnightly podcast covering everything Open Source and last weekend they held the first community run Linux exhibition in England. Jonathan Riddell, lead developer of Kubuntu, and Ben Lamb were there to demo the newly released KOffice 1.4, Kubuntu and the upcoming features of KDE 3.5. Jonathan gave a talk about Kubuntu development and KDE 4.

The day was a surprising success with over 250 people, 4 times as many as expected. Due to some last minute timetable changes the KDE talk was promoted to the main stage. Jonathan's talk focused on Kubuntu, an easy to install GNU/Linux distribution based around the KDE desktop. It is an ideal way to get the latest version of KDE and several hundred CDs were eagerly picked up by visitors.

Ben commented "Visitors were really impressed by how polished KDE applications are. Krita, the new KDE image manipulation program, was very well received and Kexi also generated a lot of interest."

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, stopped by the KDE stall. We were hoping to get a quote from him but he was speechless after seeing how easy it is to create PDFs from any KDE application and how KPDF seemlessly integrates with Konqueror.

We were also joined by Rob Taylor who is writing updated GStreamer bindings for KDE and we discussed the relative merits of KOffice against KDE integrated OpenOffice.org with Credativ UK founder and Kubuntu developer Chris Halls. Danny Allan came by to show us his monochrome icon theme, now part of KDE Accessibility and a new recruit was made for Kubuntu when Martin Meredith was persuaded to become the k3b package maintainer, famous as the program required by even the most strict of Gnome users.

Slides from Jonathan's talk are available and videos of the days events should be online soon.

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Comments

by am (not verified)

That feature is great. I use it all the time to print the "order complete" receipt when I purchase stuff online.

Keep up the great work!

by fast_rizwaan (not verified)

Print to PDF is absurd, it must be "Save as PDF" in Print dialog and in the SAVE AS dialog, no new user could know that s/he can create a pdf file by PRINTING. It's like all Great hidden features of KDE :) No offence though.

by cm (not verified)

"Save as PDF" would be wrong as it implies that you can recover your original data (a.k.a. loading). But that's not the case with PDF (the KWord PDF input filter doesn't count here).

If anything it qualifies as "lossy export".

by Jakob Petsovits (not verified)

Well, then it must be "Export to PDF". No one expects an export filter to load the exported data except if there is an appropriate importer.

by cb (not verified)

Couldn't agree more! What about "Save/Export to PDF?"

by ac (not verified)

Why not "Save/Print/Export to PDF" then? scnr =P

by Anonymous (not verified)

I've been reading Jonathan's slides and I'm curious as why is C++ listed as a not-so-cool thing? I thought the use of C++ and QT have proved one of KDE's biggest strengths.

by Anonymous (not verified)

I didn't attend Jonathan's talk but I would think that his point was about KDE being too much concentrated on C++ currently and there should be more RAD usage of JavaScript, Python, Ruby, ...

by ac (not verified)

Outside perception perhaps? (Note that nearly everyone who thinks C++ is cool must be using or developing in Qt/KDE already. People from outside lack that kind of insider knowledge.)

by lippel (not verified)

Well, compared to pure C, everything is cool.

In a perfect world, every application developer could choose the language he likes and would find perfect bindings for his language. Unfortunately we don't live in such a world ;-)
With qtruby and korundum there are very good bindings for programming KDE applications in Ruby though. Let's hope the bindings situation will be improved some day (maybe KDE4?).

by Boudewijn (not verified)

The bindings situation is already very good; Python, Ruby, Java bindings -- what more would you want?

by Eduardo Sanchez (not verified)

I, for one, would like to see Ada95 bindings. Ada is being used not only in defense; it is also a good teaching language that has many of the best features of Pascal, and we have a good GCC compiler for it. However, should you decide to develop desktop programs in it, you're forced to use GTK++/GNOME, since KDE bindings are nil.

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Ada! That's... Exotic. The closest I've ever come to Ada was PL-SQL, which
is Ada-derived.

by Leo S (not verified)

In a point about KDE4 from the slides, it says:
Win32 Applications

Does anyone know what that means? KDE will integrate more with Wine or what?

by ltmon (not verified)

I think it's a reference to the possibility that KDE apps will be ported to windows with the release of qt4 as GPL on windows.

by Aranea (not verified)

hmm? "lead developer"

by Anonymous (not verified)

Yes. Who else?

by john (not verified)

The guys on LUG Radio are always saying how terrible KDE is (love the show - but they can be totally mindless at times).

Yes KDE has it's problems (Konq usability - 2 years in and I still find it tricky to configure...) but all in all it whoops Gnomes ass on so many levels.

Then again I haven't used Gnome that much, so it may not be as bad as I imagine.

Jonathan is a brave guy to face the LUG radio crew :)

What do you want to configure in Konq?

by john (not verified)

Nothing in particular - but in general I always dread having to do any configuration in Konq - maybe it's just a psychological thing...

Maybe KDE should offer a global configure switch, which allows real time hiding and unhiding all of the applications' configure menu entries and toolbar buttons, thus making the everyday non-configure mode less screaming 'configure me now! since you can', heh...

I want to configure the window size (it should remember it, as all other apps do), and I want it to display the sidebar by default

this means "save profile", which is itself not terribly clear. a regular user would probably never discover that (I mean a regular user who doesn't try all the buttons and post to forums/ search forums instead of just dropping it - i.e. one who isn't a big konq fa, as I am :) )